Francis Gooding

There have been​ two recent opportunities to see Richard Mosse’s remarkable work in London. Broken Spectre (2022), a film and series of photographs, was displayed earlier this year in an echoing, pseudo-industrial basement space at 180 the Strand; the Hayward Gallery’s ecologically themed group show Dear Earth, which runs until 3 September, includes the related but more austere...

The guns​ are aimed at everything: primary schools, restaurants, blocks of flats, offices, houses, groups of trees, playing fields, public artworks, the railway network, the river. Anything, really: less aiming than pointing wildly in all directions, a city-wide stick-up. They’re mostly antique British cannons: the reliable naval 12-pounders that were ubiquitous on...

Like​ many other important scientific inventions, the first true recipes for gunpowder were devised in China. The classic cocktail of sulphur, saltpetre and charcoal was known from at least the ninth century CE, though Taoist alchemists, searching for both gold and immortality, had by then been aware of similar preparations for hundreds of years. A very early reference appears in the

Lacing up​ a Steenbeck editing desk to watch a reel of 35mm film is a delicate process. With the reel placed flat on the left-hand friction plate, you thread the filmstrip carefully around a pinball-like maze of rollers and sprockets. Arms clack into place, holding the strip in front of the bulb while a mirrored prism reflects the illuminated image onto the small viewing screen....

‘Ihave a neolithic kind of intelligence,’ Claude Lévi-Strauss remarked in Tristes Tropiques (1955), his luminous reminiscence of anthropological fieldwork in Brazil. He didn’t mean he was a caveman. His own gloss was that his intellectual affinities were closer to the people anthropologists usually studied than to the people doing the studying. But there’s an...